Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1988 by Jason DeParle

One odd foreshadowing of things to come lay in King's silent acceptance of his father's frequent whippings. Unlike his brother and sister, King never wept, and he refused to comply when Daddy King devised a new system to have the children take the strap to one another. Though young M.L. would willingly receive the stinging strap, he refused to apply it. King's sponge-like absorption of sorrow and guilt confounded his family again after his brother A.D. slid down a bannister and flattened King's revered grandmother. As the anxious family gathered around the reviving Grandma Williams, M.L. ran upstairs and flung himself from a window.

In graduate school at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University, King grew more serious in his intellectual habits and showed a particular concern with questions of theodicy: How to reconcile God's love and power with the presence of worldly evil? Searching for an answer, King steeped himself in Gandhi and Niebuhr, but his inquiry remained cerebral rather than activist.

That suited the members of Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church just fine. The statusconscious professionals of King's first church were looking for a pastor not a prophet. Of prophets they had had enough in three years of Vernon Johns, an eminent theologian of unparalleled eccentricity. Though Johns shared the theological stature of eminences like Mordecai Johnson, he possessed none of their polish, arriving for sermons sockless in mud-spattered shoes. He offended half of the Dexter Avenue's mannered membership with his confrontational politics (delivering a protest sermon called "It's Safe to Murder Negroes in Montgomery") and the other half with his barnyard ways (another sermon was entitled "Mud is Basic"). Johns's proud parishioners would often find him peddling fish and watermelons on the s"I get forty calls about fish for every one about religion," Johns growled in defense and submitted his resignation five times. The distraught deacons finally accepted.

Against his wife's protest, the 25-year-old King left the relative racial enlightenment he had known in Boston (and Atlanta) for the deeper Deep South. Arriving there in 1954, the politics that first concerned him were those of his church, as he sought to establish control over the willful church elders. His first sermon detailed 34 specific demands, including a new electric water fountain. King conquered the deacons quickly but grew bored. A year after his arrival, he was contemplating a deanship at Dillard University in New Orleans when Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat.

"Let me think about it and you call me back," King told E.D. Nixon, a local NAACP official, when Nixon asked him to endorse the boycott plans. King was simply one of several dozen ministers who Nixon contacted and by no means the most likely leaden King took control by way of a compromise: more experienced leaders had too many factional enemies. Cynics speculated later that, expecting defeat, the others may have set King up to take the blame.